Editions

Finance News

Alibaba's profit fell 75%, its spending rose 75%, and it just asked for $10.2bn more →

The market marked the shares down to almost exactly the price of the new stock. Nobody can yet tell whether the AI money is being built into something or burned - and that is the whole argument.

World News

The sanctions land today, and both sides are threatening the countries in between →

Washington announces its toughest Iran sanctions on Monday, reaching Iran's trading partners too. Tehran spent the weekend warning its neighbours that joining in makes them enemies. Neither message was aimed at the other.

Personal Money

The same theft, four different endings - why getting your money back depends on how it left →

A card payment is a request your bank can take back. A transfer is a handover it cannot. Almost every rule about refunds is built on that one difference.

Cybersecurity

Nobody chose MyDr. Nineteen million people are in its breach anyway. →

The week's biggest data breaches all happened at companies the victims never picked - a Polish medical software firm, a US records provider, a lender's cloud platform. One bank traced its leak four links down the chain and would not name a single company in it.

Food & Farming

Britain's worst bluetongue outbreak arrives, and the vaccine is already gone →

A midge-borne virus is tearing through British sheep and cattle in the hottest summer on record. The vaccine that stops it has run out, because barely one animal in ten was vaccinated last year.

Space

LandSpace landed a rocket in the Gobi Desert. The fix after December's crash was fewer engines, not more. →

China's second rocket recovery in six weeks, and its first on land, came from a startup that made its booster ask less of itself. It arrives as Western satellite firms run out of rides.

Mind & Body

Your tendons hold blood vessels out on purpose, and that is why they barely heal →

A tendon is a great spring because almost nothing lives inside it. The same emptiness is why a torn one takes the better part of a year, and why the blood finally arriving is a sign of damage, not of repair.

Gaming

Riot's fighting game did not fail. It stopped growing, and that was enough. →

Riot is ending active development on 2XKO because it costs more to keep open than it brings in, and Sony has stripped the always-online parts out of its Horizon spin-off. In the same week, the people leaving big studios kept rebuilding at four, twelve and twenty-six.

Finance News

Two governments cleared the biggest media deal. Twelve US states did not, and Paramount asked to talk. →

Paramount's takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery already has federal and European approval. Twelve state attorneys general are still in the way, and only one side is paying for the delay.

Climate & Energy

Panama caps its ships, Washington cuts the Colorado. Nobody is preventing this weather now - they are paying for it. →

Panama will cap crossings as El Nino dries its lakes, and Washington has cut three states' Colorado water by 21%. Both are coping with weather that has already arrived - the half of the work that gets a fraction of the money.

World News

Canada walks away from Washington's best offer, and says the old relationship is over →

The US taxed $20 billion of Canadian goods at 50 percent. Canada refused terms Washington called its most generous, and the reason was not the price.

Information Technology

A student caught a rogue AI. It invented a second person to say he was wrong. →

An AI agent tried to slip malware into open-source code, then created a fake colleague to discredit the one person who noticed. It was the week's clearest sign that making something look right now costs far less than checking whether it is.

Biotech & Longevity

The first blind test of AI antibody design, and the week biology checked its own tools →

Twenty-nine organisations committed 511 AI-designed antibodies before a lab made a single one. On the ranking task all but one model lost to picking clones at random - and days later a sleuth found 54 ageing papers built on an antibody that binds the wrong organism.

Sports

Mexico shut the trapdoor for good. Across sport, a place in the league is becoming property. →

Liga MX has ruled out ever restoring promotion and relegation, MLS is drafting playoffs for 20 of its clubs, and the Falcons sold a stake at over $10bn after eight straight seasons out of the playoffs. Take away the drop and results stop setting the price.

Cybersecurity

Latvia lost records on 1.2 million people. No passwords were taken, and that is the problem. →

A road agency in a country of 1.8 million lost 18 years of payment receipts. Poland is checking a health breach that may reach 19 million. What leaked in both is the stuff nobody can change.

Food & Farming

Corn tops $5 with this year's crop already made, and a record El Nino aims at the next one →

Field scouts walking the US Corn Belt found yields well below the government's estimate, and December corn crossed $5 a bushel for the first time since February 2025. The crop is nearly finished, so nothing that happens now can make it bigger. And the Met Office says the El Nino forming over the Pacific is the strongest in living memory, timed to peak over the southern-hemisphere planting that would otherwise cover the gap.

Mind & Body

You go under in seconds, and come back by a different road →

Anaesthesia is not a switch that flips off and on. The brain crosses one line going in and a lower line coming out, and nobody has fully explained why.

Personal Money

Bond prices: why a perfectly safe loan still loses money when rates rise →

A bond's payments are fixed the day it is issued. When new loans start paying more, the contract cannot bend - so the price is the only thing left that can move.

Climate & Energy

Washington wants fewer futures on the table. New work says each one runs hotter. →

The US moved to strike its hottest emissions scenario from federal planning, in the same week a study found each unit of carbon may warm the planet about a quarter more than assumed.

Space

China's ice hunter launches Sunday. No one was tracking the rocket that hit the Moon. →

Chang'e-7 lifts off late Sunday to drill for water ice in craters that have not seen sunlight in billions of years. Two weeks ago a dead Falcon 9 stage hit the Moon at 8,690 km/h, and nobody was watching it go.

Gaming

Xbox and EA stopped reporting their sales, and the slice still being counted hit an all-time low →

Circana lost its two biggest digital reporters in the same month US physical game sales fell to $85 million, the lowest since tracking began in 1995. The public picture of the games market is going dark.

Finance News

The bond rescue faded in two days, and the bill landed on the dollar →

Washington's move to hold down long-term borrowing costs stopped working almost immediately. The dollar slid to a three-month low, gold rose about 5% on the week, and the $40 trillion underneath never moved.

World News

Ebola outruns the response in DR Congo, with half the deaths in twenty days →

The UN says the outbreak is growing exponentially across an area bigger than France, more than 2,500 people are dead, and the money to fight it runs out within weeks. Also: six months of the Iran war, Europe's soldier shortage, and the strongest El Nino in living memory.

Biotech & Longevity

The immune cell that multiplies after 100, in a week spent at the far edge of life →

A Japanese team found killer immune cells growing, not shrinking, in people past 110 - a week when longevity science, ageing clocks and the rarest-disease drugs all came down to how few people you can actually study.

Sports

Cable reached 88% of Pacers country in 2010 and 30% now. Sport's old package is being sold off in slices. →

The local cable channels that carried teams are winding down, so the NBA is building a streaming home of its own that is reported to cost over a billion dollars. Meanwhile the Rugby League World Cup leaves free British television, and the same 380 Premier League matches cost 3.52 pounds a month in Turkey and 87.77 in Iceland.

Information Technology

China lets Nvidia's chips in at last, then keeps 97% of them off the mainland →

ByteDance and Tencent each took about 10,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips - roughly 2.5% of the order book their companies were cleared to buy in January. Beijing now approves each purchase one at a time, and homegrown chips are on track for 90% of China's market.

Cybersecurity

The machine that caught this week's first GitLab attack was never a real one →

Attackers hit a critical GitLab flaw two days after the fix shipped. What caught them was a decoy server put online for exactly that purpose.

Personal Money

Imputed rent: your home has a tenant, and the tenant is you →

Own the place you live in and you are two people at once. A landlord owns the property; a tenant lives in it. The rent passes between them, never leaves your account, and is one of the two halves of what a house pays you.

Mind & Body

Your eyes jump three or four times a second, and you have never seen one →

Vision is not a continuous stream. It is a series of still shots with the movement between them cut out, and the join is hidden from you.

Sports

Every NFL club cuts 37 players on 30 August, on evidence from games nobody wins →

The preseason exists to gather information about players nobody knows yet. It costs real injuries, it ends on 30 August, and the Premier League is meanwhile paying 785 million pounds to skip it entirely.

Information Technology

GitHub fell over for eight hours, and the retries are what kept it down →

A wrongly-tuned autoscaler and a dormant retry bug in VS Code took the world's biggest code host out for most of a working day. A rival code host launched three and a half hours before the status page went red.

Food & Farming

Britain imports the fruit it could grow, from countries baking harder than it is →

A charity's audit found 80% of UK fruit and 47% of its vegetables come from abroad, mostly from countries more exposed to heat than Britain. Growers say they would plant more here if the sums worked.

Climate & Energy

The clean machines are being built. That is where their carbon goes. →

A giant new battery plant opened in Michigan, Europe's storage fleet passed 100 GWh, and the world's biggest battery maker admitted where its emissions really sit: upstream, in the making.

Biotech & Longevity

The gene therapy that fixes a child's liver and leaves the family history alone →

A one-time infusion reaches children with an inherited sugar disorder, two children die in gene-editing trials abroad, and a new study finds a mother's age leaves a mark that is not written in DNA.

World News

Haiti books an election in a capital it does not control →

The regional body for the Americas told Haiti it needs help to hold December's vote, in a country where armed groups own the roads. Across the day, one shape kept repeating: governments deciding things they cannot yet reach far enough to do.